For the cats

Spring is kitten season. This is when cats across the U.S. multiply in waves. As a result, many animal shelters in the following months tend to find themselves overcrowded and struggling to stay afloat.

It’s for this reason that the Muncie Clerk’s Office and Muncie Police Department came up with the idea of allowing people to pay their parking tickets using cat food and cat supplies, all to be given to Muncie Animal Care & Services.

The short program was announced through a video on the Muncie Police Department’s Facebook page.

A great idea

In the video, Officer Jamie Brown shared her experience volunteering at Muncie Animal Care & Services the previous day. She recounts how overwhelmed the whole operation was trying to take care of more than 350 cats every day.

Then she said what the city planned to do about it, with the help of the community and a few unpaid parking tickets.

She also went on to explain that the goal of this little experiment wasn’t just to encourage more people to pay their tickets. Their main aim was to raise money or donations for the struggling animal shelter.

She also offered donation pickups by uniformed officers for people who couldn’t make it to the clerk’s office or the police station.

Anyone in the area who was interested could call a number at the Muncie Police Department and request a pickup of donations. Later in the day; a uniformed officer would come and pick them up. Now, that’s service.

Approval

People loved the idea. The video alone got more than 40,000 views with hundreds of comments and shares.

However, that’s not all. On the final day of the campaign, the Muncie Police Department shared posts on Facebook and Twitter, showing the results of the campaign.

They started with an almost empty storage room that is now full of cat food and other supplies. The campaign worked. Many more people than usual had honored their parking tickets and even people without tickets, who liked the idea, offered something as well.